We have pheasants round here like some dogs have fleas.
Sadly, pheasants are difficult to photograph when you're on foot, because they tend to run at speed
(although quite frequently not sensibly away from you...). In the car, you do all you can to avoid killing them
-- but, sometimes, it seems like they have a suicide gene....
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Sadly, John Fowles -- one of my favourite authors;
and, in my opinion, one of the most talented of the 20th century
-- died last week. (He lived reasonably near here, in Lyme Regis.)
This excerpt from his diary for 30 October 1966 seems somehow apposite:
"I live like a hermit, my closest companion the little blue tit that roosts under the canopy every night.
The weather is very fine, cool but clear; the moon huge each night. It can't be good for me, I wear filthy old clothes,
don't wash, eat bits of food at wrong hours, let the kitchen proliferate into piles of mess and dirty dishes, drift round the fields
and let them become parts of me, like the wildlife. Yet this last is a beautiful experience, in itself and because not many generations more
will ever know it. Science and overpopulation must swamp nature; of course there will be reserves and naturalists still,
but by 2066 no one will be able to have this strange symbiosis with nature. I live like Jefferies,
like John Clare. I can't celebrate it in words -- not lack of words so much
as the knowledge that I cannot surpass their words.
I mean I become an element of nature myself..."
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The feather was found near here:
